[lscharen]

That’s a great point. Seeing lots of mocks and assertions that certain functions are called is often much ado about nothing since no actual code functionality is exercised. I do sometimes see the return value functionality of mocks used as a stub, just because the dev hasn’t internalized the distinction and can “make it work” with a mocking library.

One of the only legit use cases for mocks that I have personally come across is validating things like a sequence of API calls to an external service, or queries to a database where there is a check that certain efficiencies are guaranteed, e.g. verify that an N+1 select problem doesn’t creep in, or knowing that a app-level caching layer will prevent redundant API calls.